That’s nice that Google Analytics has all this info about our website traffic, but how do we see whether our campaigns are truly effective?

Well, good news, assuming you’ve set up Google Analytics goals to track, you can see if visitors are taking those actions after clicking particular links, whether from emails, Facebook ads, Google Display Ads, or even referral links from other websites.

Check it out in the video below. We also discuss our recommendation around how to handle Paid Social Ads, given the fact that Google Analytics came out before there were social media ads.

Note: Here’s a video covering the same material as this article, in case reading detailed posts isn’t your cup of tea.

Take a moment to think about why your business has a website in the first place. Your site is not a static brochure that you tell people to go look at; it is a lead-generation machine. Your business’s site should be working for you, bringing in leads, and making your job easier (certainly not harder!). So how do you make your website into an effective tool for churning out valuable leads?

That’s where website analytics tools enter the picture. Website analytics can help you make sure that the site is doing its job — bringing in more clients/customers (or donations/volunteers if you are running a nonprofit). Secondly, analytics can help you identify ways to fine-tune your website so that it can do an even better job. Here are some of the questions that analytics can answer for you:

You shouldn’t spend money on digital marketing unless you have the proper analytics set up to measure the results. But what if customers aren’t buying something directly from your website like they would on an e-commerce store?

For local businesses, a conversion is usually when a lead contacts them. This can be through:

a contact form

a phone call

an email

a scheduled appointment

Luckily, it’s possible to track these website actions. Yes! It can be done with the power of an amazing free tool called Google Tag Manager (GTM).

From the business owner’s perspective, Google Analytics is in the category of incredible stuff that’s free. By placing a short snippet of code on your site, you are able to see how many people come to your website, how they found you (like from SEO or SEM), and what they did once they arrived. Speaking in pre-Google terms, this would be a costly enterprise software suite, not a free service, which it now is.

Now that we have the proper gratefulness for “GA,” let’s talk about what metrics a business owner should focus on in the busy and complicated-looking interface.